Detroit Is the Future

One thing for certain, is that in politics, ethics and morality is a sign of cowardice.  They are the dead weights of any autocratic disposition when it comes to profits and financial gain, in particular when buttressed on the backs and hard work of those whom anyone seeking and securing the highest office in these United States of America – the presidency, need to obtain power.

Thus it should come as no surprise, as was the case with presidents before him, that Barack Obama has learned this lesson well.  Since he has taken office, while implementing the same policies of Bush and Clinton before him, U.S. businesses have never had it so good. As we speak, the masses are working harder than ever before, that is if they have a job or if under employed.  The global banking houses and large multi-national corporations have more loot than they can ever use and continue to add more and more each day, whether we are speaking in terms of cash on balance sheets or in terms of their proportion of ownership of the U.S. economy.

I start with Clinton because it was in the 1990s when our service industry began to bloom and our manufacturing base declined, and it may have had its signature moment when he signed into law, with Republican approval, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (welfare reform) in 1996. Yes, this was the start of the rapid growth of the so-called 1 percent, which Obama has increased more dramatically in economic prosperity in five years than the sixteen combined years of both Bush and Clinton.  It continued when Clinton ended Glass-Stegall, Signed GATT and NAFTA into law and implemented the Commodities Futures Modernization act which not only gave way to new fancy smancy accounting methods but also the mass proliferation of various complex papers based on selling debt.  And with a debt based economy come the obvious, less jobs, less employment, less value in the dollar, a decline in available jobs and an increase in overall poverty.

You see, it isn’t particle physics, but rather the natural result of Keynesian political/economic philosophy that results in what we see in places like Detroit. In simple terms, from this perspective, growth in corporate profits is directly correlated to people being paid less and less. This means that if profits continue to grow for the few, wages will continue to decline for the majority. And as wages continue to decline the US labor market will never ever be able to reach full employment – ever. Namely because companies make their profits by employing as few workers as possible and by transporting what jobs are available abroad to places like India and China.

This is not by accident. As I pen this, we are in a time in which working-age people now make up the majority in U.S. households that rely on food stamps. It used to be the elderly and children. All because government polices produced within the beltway are nothing more that state supported economic theft and terrorism. Policies that over leverage economic gain singularly toward the direction of corrupt plutocrats in the form of capital misallocation courtesy of the Federal Reserve Bank in the form this time of what is called Quantative Easing. In 2012 alone, more than 200 people became billionaires which when added to the more than 1400 billionaires in the US, gives them an estimated $5.4 trillion in combined net worth.

President Obama’s focus on deficit spending doesn’t and will never help the folk who may or may not have voted for him but it does help those whom he appoints to political positions and his other large campaign contributors. The people on Wall Street have access to funding, at a cheap price too given the Federal Reserve Bank’s penchant for hold down interest rates near zero while people who are the heart of America see their rent and food and gas cost steadily rise.  Many call this outcome “internal devaluation,” and is what we have seen abroad in Europe especially in nations like Italy, Greece, Spain  and more recently the Ukraine.

Now if you watch TV or even listened to the President’s State of The Union Address, you probably think it is all good, but that is only because of “newspeak” and selectively telling you what they want you to know.  For example, the only reason they can report that American competitiveness increased by over 10%, is because folks are getting paid less and due to all the benefits and wealth that is counted is what is on the books of big corporations.  They will tell you that  in December that that employment grew by 74,000 jobs and that as a consequence, the unemployment rate went from 7.0% to 6.7%.  But what they won’t say is that to keep up with the new folk entering the work force (which are not counted as unemployed) the nation needs 250,000 jobs just to maintain pace for this group of available workers alone. Or that the same month, the net number of folk with jobs (full-time and part-time) fell by 400,000 to a 35 year low. Then to add insult to injury, they will say that American economic productivity has grown in the area of about 7 percent since 2007, as if that is a good thing, but won’t say that during the same period in China it grew 90 percent.

 These are dire times in America and unfortunately, President Obama and his economic team are not making things any better for the majority of US citizens. What they are doing is developing the middle class in China at the expense of the middle class here for all the jobs that were once middle class (like in Detroit) are now in China. And this is their game, to artificially promote fake progress, while lowering the wages of Americans and growing unemployment, while the rich get richer, because they want a global market place with a global labor pool that they can pick and choose who to pay what.  By doing this, American job seekers will by default have to take lower wages, meaning the middle class is gone and that Detroit, is the future of America.